08 August 2016

Poem-A-Day #161 : Wood (Part 8 : Cain)

I always found Cain more interesting than Abel. You can read Part One HERE.Wood (Part 8 : Cain)

I stand out back by the dumpster and I have the remains of the picture frame from before with me in a dust pan and I stare up at the hill in front of me that is an embankment that supports the overpass of a highway : this is behind my apartment building and it's August and hot and the clouds are just starting to gather over the mountains and maybe they will come into town tonight and raise Cain :

How does one invoke Cain exactly : is it just the spectre of being up to no good or is there an incantation a sort of rolling back of the tomb door a beckoning finger in the darkness : and what if you do go in that space and do take the hand of the very long dead fictional character : does he eat your brain and infect you with murder do you come out the other side into day :

Be like Abel right : meek and killed : be the one who refuses anger : look at the mountain for a moment : you see the light and dark patches from here it's hard to tell but the dark is pine and the light is aspen : people come from all over to see the aspen turn yellow in the fall : they're called leaf peepers and I find that disturbing : voyeur of leaves :

The point is that the aspen are being killed off by the pine : there was a huge fire up there a hundred years ago aspen are one of the first things to come in and reclaim land after a fire : they have a shared root system and are very resistant to fires : the point is that they are a first wave reclamation plant : they come in and keep erosion away :

The pine trees are what was there what will be there should be there : if you can should at nature let's not debate that but you understand that nature isn't a should or anything like that but for our purposes that mountain should be covered in it : pine not aspen : so those peepers are shit out of luck eventually :

That's invoking Cain : forest fire : an untouchable un-understandable thing like the instant that murder came into the world : uncontrolled and moving and apart from ourselves : so Cain is perhaps still roaming the earth unable to rest : he is Sisyphus pushing a rock up a hill and his rock is death and evil and able to move suddenly far away from him and then he must go seek it :